By Kurt Cobb, Resource Insights
Truth is a very difficult thing to come by. Usually, when humans stumble onto it, they don't even know they have. America started out as a nation skeptical of royal prerogatives and concentration of power. We've morphed into a gullible society easily manipulated by dreams of a techno-utopian future.
By Joel Stronberg, Civil Notion
Democracy survives by the consent of the governed. It requires rules that are fair, just and followed—by everyone. Should the three branches ever become one, democracy will be lost.
By Richard Eckersley, Resilience.org
The crisis in democracy is much discussed these days, but almost entirely in political terms that ignore its deeper causes.
By Dick Rauscher, Dick Rauscher blog
Driven by zero-sum thinking, the rigid, inflexible, ideological thinking and obsessive need of our collective human ego to be absolutely and imperatively “right”, is rapidly driving our Nation and our American democracy toward collapse.
By Joel Stronberg, Civil Notion
From Mother Earth's perspective, the most important ballots cast on November 6th could be in the 30 contests for state attorney general (AG). The role played by AGs in the nation's transition to a low-carbon economy is easily ignored in the heat of this year's Congressional elections.
By Ian Hughes, Open Democracy
Is it possible to transform politics around values such as empathy, solidarity and love? Many progressive commentators think so, and have laid out different plans to put these ideas into practice. But empathy and love seem in short supply in the actuality of politics today, crowded out by hate and intolerance.
By Gleb Tsipursky, Common Dreams
Rudy Giuliani, the former Republican mayor of New York City and now serving as President Donald Trump's personal lawyer, went on NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday and declared with a straight(-ish) face that "truth isn't truth."
By Karen Greenberg, TomDispatch
Perhaps instead of hurling insults at President Trump’s incompetence and the seeming disarray of his presidency, it might be worth taking a step back and asking ourselves whether there is indeed a larger goal in mind: namely, a slow, patient, incremental dismantling of democracy, beginning with its most precious words.
By Rob Hopkins, Rob Hopkins blog
I was intrigued as to what impact living in a state of ‘Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder’ might have on the human imagination, on its ability to flourish, and to imagine the future in positive ways. Are we all, to one degree or another, living in a state of ‘Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder’?
By Timothy Summers, The Conversation
The problem isn’t that this psychographic data were exploited at a massive scale. It’s that platforms like Facebook enable people’s data to be used in ways that take power away from voters and give it to data-analyzing campaigners. In my view, this kills democracy.